Seafood Magazine and Smart & Final

These are fish-conscious times, and one result is Simply Seafood ($1.95), a new magazine sold only in supermarkets--usually right in the seafood section. The first issue is slickly produced and has a lot of the things you’d expect: features on salmon, mussels and pan poaching, quick recipes, a wine column, a nutrition column and a couple of celebrity cook articles.

However, it covers seafood in somewhat more detail than you might expect. (It’s published by Waterfront Press, which also produces two important trade journals for the seafood industry.) The salmon feature gives detailed protein and fat data on the six major salmon species. There are reports on seafood market conditions around the world and new seafood species becoming available, and one page is a very useful chart suggesting substitutes for the fish your recipe calls for if you can’t find it in the market.

Smart & Final, which caters to independent food service operators, clubs and small businesses as well as to individual shoppers, now has a special order catalogue for 180 items that might be difficult for the ordinary shopper to locate. They include such things as gas griddles, a table top food bar, Chinese tea cups and even “doggie bags.” Probably clubs and organizations will be most interested in the service, but it could be handy for big parties such as home wedding receptions.

You can order the items at any Smart & Final store in California, Arizona and Nevada. Take an order form from the special order catalogue display, fill it out and take it to the cash register, where you put down a 25% deposit. The items will be delivered to the local Smart & Final store within two to three weeks. Smart & Final will also order merchandise the stores don’t normally carry, or research any customer’s special request.